Modern electronics, such as smart phones, personal digital assistants, location based services devices, digital cameras, music players, computers, routers, servers, and storage arrays, are packing more integrated circuits into an ever-shrinking physical space with expectations for decreasing cost. Both higher performance and lower power are also quintessential requirements for electronics to continue proliferation into everyday. For example, more functions are packed into a cellular phone with higher performance and longer battery life. Numerous technologies have been developed to meet these requirements.
Integrated circuits are often manufactured in and on silicon and other integrated multi-layer circuit wafers. Integrated circuits include literally millions of metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFET) and other active and passive circuit devices. Advances in integrated circuit technology continue to shrink the sizes of these devices and drive for higher performance with minimum power consumption. This dichotomy has inspired various approaches to solve the need for speed at lower power.
One approach involves continued shrinkage of key features of the integrated circuit technology while using new materials. This approach provides a size reduction but continues to struggle balancing cost, performance, and power.
One area where the paradox of performance, power, and cost is most evident in the modern semiconductor manufacturing era is in the need to reduce the size of transistors of an integrated circuit.
Thus, a need still remains for improving the yield, cost, and performance of the basic semiconductor structures and manufacturing to obtain maximum performance improvement, power reduction, or both. In view of the demand for faster and higher capacity semiconductor devices, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.